What am I learning in school?

One of my final papers this quarter will be about Rose Pastor Stokes.  In college, I spent spring semester doing an independent study (among my other classes). At first it was about how the different waves of Jewish immigrants affected U.S. politics. But it evolved into a series of shorter papers on various Jewish immigrant women who were players in the new socialist and communist parties in the U.S. I met Rose Pastor Stokes there. I was fascinated. Most of the women I learned about had stayed within their communities for marriage. Situating themselves for most of their lives on the Lower East Side in NYC. However, Rose Pastor Stokes married a Protestant philanthropist that ran a settlement house. It was apparent that she wanted to become truly American and her marriage into this WASP family pushed her even further. Eventually, the marriage dissolved and as this happened she was drawn more and more to the left, eventually becoming one of the founding members of the American commmunist party.

I am thrilled to have found her papers on microfilm. So, I will be spending a lot of time staring at little things when they arrive from interlibrary loan. I will also be looking at her unfinished autobiography.

My research question is about her Jewish identity. In a lot of these accounts of activists, even though they identify as Jewish, they don’t mention much. So, I want to look into that question of how she acted Jewishly. Did she ever mention going to synagogue? did she celebrate holidays? etc.

anouncements (of a sort)

I now have the camp song “announcements” in my head…the one that has boom chick boom boom boom in it?

Anyway. I have one life announcement and then just some things I’m thinking about.

announcement: I have my summer plans. People that know me in real life know that I had formulated a summer plan, but that plan was thwarted when I was not accepted to the program to which I had applied. Instead, I’m going to Pardes, in Israel, to study Jewish things for the summer. I’m not trying to be vague. I’ll be studying Torah, Talmud, and contemporary issues. Just the sorts of things that will help bolster my phd apps which I have to start writing in the fall. I’ll be leaving for Israel at the end of June and arriving back in the midwest mid-August. I’m hoping to pick up a job for the last month (through school, most likely) to help pay for my life and bills, etc.

Other things:

1. I am very excited to have ordered my first inter-library loan thing here at U of C. And it’s microfiche, which I haven’t used in ions. But, for my religous history class, we need to use primary sources. So, I found this women’s papers!

2. I’m thinking of starting a regular feature called “what am I doing in school” or something like that. This would be easy for me to update. I know I’ve been slow. I just have lots of reading to do.

3. I’m really really glad it’s the weekend and that I don’t have class on Fridays. It feels good to sleep in.

4. This is what I’m looking forward to this weekend: sushi and trader joe’s tonight, a hair cut (yay!) and possibly lunch in logan square tomorrow (always fun) , and tea with a smithie on Sunday. Oh, and lots of school work, too. Of course.

First Hike of 2009

Here in Chicago I’ve been craving the woods. Everywhere in the city there are people, even if you don’t see them. They are there, living in the 3 flats and high rises, walking along lakeshore path, or driving down the street. Even though I knew that I’d see some people on a trail in the woods, I figured it would be a good place for peace.

I went home on Friday evening, arriving just in time for Shabbat dinner. Yum! Saturday was a lazy day, beginning with laundry and Riley’s graduation from “teenager” class at obedience school. I’m so proud. I ran errands and then in late afternoon my sister and I got ready for a hike. We had planned to go to Governor Dodge, which is our favorite state park. But it wasn’t going to work out timewise. We tried out a new park: Indian Lake County Park which was about 20 minutes outside of town. It was perfect. There was a pretty lake and it was situated on the edge of the driftless region, which always makes things interesting.

We chose the easiest hike as we were still short on time. The hike was about 1.3 miles. Although labeled as easiest, at other parks it would at least be considered a hike of medium difficulty. There were lots of steep hills. The views were great, and we saw many fallen trees. My sister and talked and walked and she took some photos. Here are a few that Allison took:

And sisters on the first hike of 2009:

Chag Sameach Pesach! Happy Passover!

It’s begun. My favorite holiday of the year. A celebration of freedom and a recollection of oppression. My fondest seder memories are of Smith, of course, where I labored, sophomore and senior year, for hours in the weeks preceeding the holidy in the basement graphic design lab in Seeley, creating and digitzing the Smith Hagaddah. That is where I felt closest to the holiday and where I began to cherish its existence. My first year at Smith, I merely contributed a portion to the zine-like collaboration that turned into the Hagaddah. But, after that year, when the wonderful seniors had graduated, I aspired to make it easy to change out different sections, to reflect the annual themse. So, I digitized it, using first Pagemaker and then InDesign. It was a difficult, yet fun and intense experience for my partner-in-crime, M and I. The product was beautiful.

This year, I only went to one seder. It was the family seder, where we use a 1950s version of the Union Hagaddah. This is an old-school reform document with all the thous and thys in place. In years past, I’ve felt offended by its content. But, after I changed the gendered language when spoke last year, one of the parents finally explained why we still read from it. I love history, especially Jewish history and family histor. So, now, since I understand that it is a family tradition, a historic re-enactment, if you will, of our family’s seders, that happen the same way each year, I am accepting of its gendered language. And while we read from the book, I think about how far we’ve come.

Our seders have changed over the years of my memory. Sometimes, we’d have them in Florida. And some years, my immediate family couldn’t make it to the big Chicago family seder, and we’d have it in whatever small city  in Wisconsin we lived in, with a hodge-podge of other families who also chose not to travel. We used to have them at my aunt’s old house, and then her new house. And now that she’s older and tired, her daughter hosts the seder. We used to have brisket and chicken. Now, we have chicken and steak from the grill. We always have our cousin (parent’s age) who makes up a prayer to bless the egg, because no one ever claims to remember how to say it in Hebrew (although this year someone did). We sing out of tune. We compete on “who knows one”. And of course, the youngest look for the affikomen. What’s different is how old everyone is. We have some babies that didn’t come. But the children looking for the affikomen numbered 2, and they were in 4th and 5th grade. I can now have reasonable, non-awkward conversations with my college-aged cousins (I’m second oldest in our generation). Although I did regale  them of stories of our first family reunions, when they were babies and toddlers.

And even though I was tired from the crazy bus to train ride that it took to get out to the suburbs after a day of classes and a week of non-stop reading, the seder was fun. And it reminded me how I miss and love my extended family.

The New Class Review

It’s Monday of the second week of the quarter. All of my classes have met once. And today’s, of course, has met twice. This quarter will be good, I think. The first year of grad school is about finding balance, and figuring out what works best for your learning style. Of one thing I’m certain: quarter system is NOT for me. I really struggle with the accellerated nature of our classes. I basically need to have 3 final paper ideas by next week. Which will only be our third meeting. Ugh.

I’m taking an assortment this quarter, based on what programs I’m planning on applying to next year. I’m taking a class on women in American religious history, a class on scriptural authority in rabbinic literature, and a class on Orientalism. One of the best parts of this quarter is the new faces. Our cohort is so big that I haven’t met everybody. So this week and last, I’ve met 3 new people! Apparently, one has seen me before and remembers me because I have a cute, short hair cut. Which is really nice of her, and a funny way to remember someone you don’t know…

Other exciting things of note:

On Friday we (friends and I) went to see Marjane Satrapi, writer of Persepolis. She was amazing! and it was fun to hear someone like that speak in a very un-U of C environment (we were at Columbia College).

And on Saturday, I went out to Logan Square to hang out with my Smith friends. Which was fun, nice, and normal. I made Hazelnut-Spinach pesto pasta with walnuts as a substitute. It was sooooo green. What was fun, though, was infusing the olive oil with a rosmary sprig. You could really taste the rosemary in the pesto. We had a few other things as well, including some really yummy chocolate-mint bars too.

I also helped out at the Divinity Students Association book sale on Saturday. I helped sort books. And tomorrow, I will help sell for a couple of hours. I am not planning on buying anything, no matter how tempting (unless it’s a school book).  It was a really nice couple of hours hanging out with people I don’t see as often.

All-in-all a good weekend.